Tiny Portion Of NYC Streets Sees Nearly Half Of Pedestrian Deaths

NEW YORK — Not all streets are created equal. Nearly half of New York City's pedestrian deaths happen on a tiny portion of its roadways, city officials said Tuesday as they unveiled new plans to improve street safety.

The city's latest crash data shows that 424 miles of road — only 7 percent of the city's streets — host almost half of all pedestrian fatalities, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office said.

City officials say they'll use that data to target the most dangerous roadways for upgrades improvements, some of which will be made this year.

"Sometimes it will be a redesign of a street or an intersection or an area. Sometimes it will be more enforcement. Sometimes it will be more education. Sometimes it will be all three," de Blasio, a Democrat, said Tuesday. "But whatever it takes, we’re going do it."

The Department of Transportation has added 16 priority corridors to its new "Borough Pedestrian Safety Plans," which were first created in 2015 as part of the city's Vision Zero initiative to end traffic deaths and injuries.

By the end of this year, the city will give pedestrians a head start at every intersection where possible along those corridors and tweak traffic signals to reduce speeding, officials said. The city also plans to track violations along the corridors and work with the NYPD to do "high-visibility" enforcement, officials said.

These kinds of fixes have a record of success, city officials say — the dangerous spots the DOT targeted in 2015 have seen an average 36 percent drop in pedestrian deaths, which has helped drive down the citywide total.

The borough safety plans "have enabled us to target our resources where they will save the most lives," Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg said in a statement. "In these updated plans, we have used the freshest data to identify new crash-prone corridors and intersections most in need of our full menu of safety interventions."

Pedestrian deaths in the city increased last year despite a record-low number of traffic fatalities overall. Some 111 pedestrians had been killed as of Dec. 27, compared with 106 in the same period in 2017, the mayor's office said that month.

But the city touted drastic reductions in pedestrian deaths and serious injuries in places that got safety upgrades. For example, officials said, a 3.6-mile stretch of Bushwick Avenue in Brooklyn that got a new sidewalk, a painted median, a bike-friendly parking lane, pedestrian "refuge islands" and other improvements saw a 50 percent decrease.

Here are the dangerous corridors that the DOT has newly targeted for safety upgrades.

Manhattan

• Columbus Avenue from Ninth Avenue to Morningside Drive
• York Avenue from Sutton Place to the FDR Drive
• 10th Avenue from West Street to 59th Street

Brooklyn

• Linden Boulevard from Flatbush Avenue to Sapphire Street
• Eighth Avenue from 39th Street to 73rd Street
• Surf Avenue from Ocean Parkway to Atlantic Avenue
• Bedford Avenue from Manhattan Avenue to Flatbush Avenue

Queens

• Rockaway Boulevard from Eldert Lane to Third Street
• 37th Avenue from 114th Street to Woodside Avenue
• 21st Street from 50th Avenue to 20th Avenue

The Bronx

• Westchester Avenue from Third Avenue to Bronx River Avenue
• Boston Road from Third Avenue to Bronx Park East
• Soundview Avenue from White Plains Road to Bruckner Boulevard

Staten Island

• Targee Street from Van Duzer Street to Richmond Road
• Bradley Avenue from Watchogue Road to Brielle Avenue
• Lincoln Avenue from Richmond Road to Father Capodanno Boulevard

(Lead image: Mayor Bill de Blasio, center, and Transportation Commissioner Polly Trottenberg, second from right, appear at a Tuesday news conference to unveil new plans for street safety. Photo by Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)